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U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

reuters.com

391–400 of 507 posts

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#391

Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but oft…

I think we need to add a new level 2 assisted driving skills section to driving tests. Level 2 can be safer but it really requires understanding how level 2 works and limitations. For example, when I use level 2 (mine is Honda but applies to other level 2 as well since they mostly share the same vendor), these are the rules I follow: - Car switching in/out of my lane, I manually take over - Tight curve in the freeway…

Seems like it's easier just to drive regularly. This sounds very distracted

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#392
post #184

There is about 36000 death on the road per year in the USA for 280 millions vehicles, that's 128.5 death/million vehicule/year If we assume the number of tesla autopilot death double this year to 8 (from 4 at the time of probe launch), for about 900 thousand tesla on the road in USA, that's 8.9 autopilot death/million tesla/year. Ratio between the numbers of 14.4. Tesla reporting says for Q1 2021 one crash on autopil…

> If we assume

You shouldn't. 16% of accidents are pedestrians. 8% are motorcyclists. 40% of accidents involve excessive speed or drugs and alcohol.

Accidents aren't a fungible item you can do this with.

> bag on the passenger seat since there's no software option to disable the beeping.

There is in the US for the rear seats. Additionally, you can just leave the belt always clicked in and just sit on top of them. There aren't many great technological solutions to human behavior.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#393

Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but oft…

As this reddit post pointed out, this appears to be a common problem with radar TACC. https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/p5ekci/us_agen... """ These events occur typically when a vehicle is partially in a lane and radar has to ignore a stationary object. This is pretty standard and inherent with TACC + radar. The faster Tesla pushes the vision only stack to all cars after they’ve validated the data, the fa…

FWIW: Tesla AP is primarily vision based now. Newer cars in the US aren't even being fitted out with the radar units anymore (mine doesn't have it, for instance). So while this may in some sense be an unavoidable edge case for radar, it really shouldn't be for Tesla Autopilot.

It's worth checking out for sure. Not worth the headline bandwidth and flamage budget being spent on it.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#394

Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but oft…

I think we need to add a new level 2 assisted driving skills section to driving tests. Level 2 can be safer but it really requires understanding how level 2 works and limitations. For example, when I use level 2 (mine is Honda but applies to other level 2 as well since they mostly share the same vendor), these are the rules I follow: - Car switching in/out of my lane, I manually take over - Tight curve in the freeway…

I wonder if some sort of standard display showing what the vehicle "sees" and is predicted to do will be regulated. For example, if the display shows the vehicle doesn't understand a firetruck parked half way in the lane or the tight curve on the freeway, at least the driver can validate on the display and have some time to react.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, let's ignore all the good and force everyone to go back to human drivers that are 10x worse.

Tesla does not offer a vehicle that does not require human drivers (not even momentarily). Tesla's autopilot and FSD systems are both SAE Level 2, which means the human is still in operation of the vehicle at all times . All of Tesla's driving assistance technologies require a human to monitor operation of the vehicle and intervene if necessary. The fact that they have given anyone an impression otherwise is problema…

> The fact that they have given anyone an impression otherwise is problematic.

Good grief. This meme will not die. The car literally tells you to keep your hands on the wheel every time you engage autopilot, yells at you if you don't, will lock you out of the system as punishment if you don't comply, and if you really seem disabled will bring the car to a stop and turn the hazards on. It simply will not operate without an attentive driver, or at the very least one spending considerable energy at defeating the attention nags.

There are exactly zero Tesla drivers in the world who don't know these rules. Just stop with the nonsense. Please.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#396
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, let's ignore all the good and force everyone to go back to human drivers that are 10x worse.

Less than 100 first responders are hit annually in the USA. The fact that just Tesla has managed to hit 11 since 2018 makes it pretty clear that human drivers are not "10x worse" than Tesla's tech, but quite the opposite.

You are comparing two different things. 11 responder vehicles crashes is not comparable to how many first responders (people) are hit.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#397
I remember that video "driver is only there because of regulatory rules". That is a flat out lie, safe to say so by now. The autopilot accidents per distance is also cherry picked, turn on autopilot everywhere , including bad weather and see how that comparison goes. And the claim that the cars have all the hardware for future fsd is quite out there too. It's a bit like saying I have the next Michael Phelps here, he just cannot swim yet.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#398
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla does not offer a vehicle that does not require human drivers (not even momentarily). Tesla's autopilot and FSD systems are both SAE Level 2, which means the human is still in operation of the vehicle at all times . All of Tesla's driving assistance technologies require a human to monitor operation of the vehicle and intervene if necessary. The fact that they have given anyone an impression otherwise is problema…

> The fact that they have given anyone an impression otherwise is problematic. Good grief. This meme will not die. The car literally tells you to keep your hands on the wheel every time you engage autopilot, yells at you if you don't, will lock you out of the system as punishment if you don't comply, and if you really seem disabled will bring the car to a stop and turn the hazards on. It simply will not operate witho…

> There are exactly zero Tesla drivers in the world who don't know these rules. Just stop with the nonsense. Please.

Tesla's marketing also knows that there are exactly zero drivers in the world who follow those rules, but that doesn't stop them from overselling the capabilities of what they ship.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#399

Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but oft…

I think we need to add a new level 2 assisted driving skills section to driving tests. Level 2 can be safer but it really requires understanding how level 2 works and limitations. For example, when I use level 2 (mine is Honda but applies to other level 2 as well since they mostly share the same vendor), these are the rules I follow: - Car switching in/out of my lane, I manually take over - Tight curve in the freeway…

> Level 2 can be safer but [...]

I think that requires more numerate analysis than you're giving though. The data from the story is a sample size of 11 crashes over three years (I think). If that's really the size of the effect, then your "but [...]" clause seems very suspect.

There are almost two million of these cars on the roads now. It seems extremely likely that the number of accidents prevented by AP dwarfs this effect, so arguing against it even by implication as you do here seems likely to be doing more harm than good.

That doesn't mean it's not worth investigating what seems like an identifiable edge case in the AP obstacle detection. But that's a bug fix, not an argument about "Level 2 Autonomy" in general.

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